If the characters had as much depth as the plot, this would be a very satisfying novel.
The death of her beloved twin provokes a woman to excavate the fragments of a long-buried past.
Tucker (The Cure for Modern Life, 2008, etc.) begins with Lila Cole, a literature professor with an unusually strong attachment to stories and characters, whose life has just been wrested from its calm by her brother Billy’s suicide. We retrace recent history to learn that Billy was the gatekeeper of the twins’ shared history, having gone to great lengths to obliterate a painful childhood. Independent of her brother, Lila knows very little of her life’s narrative, a fact that his death suddenly brings to her attention. Billy’s quest for reinvention has failed, as witness his suicide, but the author nevertheless meditates on the futility of such efforts throughout. When Lila first meets her husband, for example, she is ruminating on why Twain sends Jim back into slavery in Huckleberry Finn, after Jim has made such sacrifices to escape. We all have to go back eventually, the novel tells us. Lila does, and the suspenseful developments that ensue constitute the book’s principal attraction. Rather less appealing is the dialogue, which often seems like a tool for tying up loose plot points rather than for illuminating the characters’ emotional depths. There isn’t much to be teased out here, aside from the mystery the author is plainly constructing regarding Billy and Lila’s past. Still, the lure of discovering the Cole family’s secrets serves as a powerful motivator, and Tucker does a perfect job of parceling out the details. Readers with an attachment to American literature will also enjoy the parallels with Twain and Melville that run throughout.
If the characters had as much depth as the plot, this would be a very satisfying novel.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7538-2
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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